Classical Music | Cello Music

Recorded on 01/18/2012, uploaded on 01/18/2012

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

With the success of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Shostakovich suddenly found himself ranked among the foremost of Soviet composers. Its premiere in 1934 was an instant success and praised by audiences and officials alike. However, the opera would soon become a source of problems, both personally and professionally, for the composer. Reveling in its success, Shostakovich became infatuated with a young student he had met at a festival in Leningrad featuring Lady Macbeth. The affair led to an upheaval of his personal life and a divorce from his wife, Nina, in 1935. During their separation, Shostakovich composed his solo sonata for the cello. The sonata was premiered on December 25 in Moscow with the composer himself at the piano and Viktor Kubatsky, also the work’s dedicatee, as soloist. Purportedly, Shostakovich first read of Stalin’s attack against his music on the way to the premiere. The Cello Sonata would ultimately evade any official denunciation, but other works, such as Lady Macbeth, faced the wrath of Stalin’s propaganda machine and others still were later withdrawn.

Cast in four movements, the Cello Sonata has much in common with Shostakovich’s symphonic works and is full of his typical sarcasm and wit. The Allegro non troppo opening movement, at first a quite conventional sonata form with two regular lyrical themes, suddenly abandons all formal considerations with its unusual recapitulation and mysterious close. The following Scherzo movement, marked Allegro, rather snubs its nose at those that would make demands of the composer’s music and attempt to control his artistic will. In contrast, the Largo third movement presents a rhapsodic, lyrical theme, and is a foreshadowing of the tone that would dominate many of the composer’s later works. Lastly, the Finale adopts a playful and energetic mood, but ends quite abruptly defying any expectations of a showcase ending.      Joseph DuBose

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Conata for Cello and Piano, Op. 40     Dmitry Shostakovich

This sonata was one of Shostakovich’s early works, composed in December 1934, just prior to the censure by Soviet authorities of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. He completed it within a few weeks and gave its premiere in Moscow soon thereafter with his close friend, the cellist Viktor Kubatsky, its dedicatee. 

The sonata form first movement contrasts a broad first theme in the cello, accompanied by flowing piano arpeggios, developed by the piano to an intense climax. As tension abates, a ray of light appears with the tender second theme, with unusual tonal shifts, announced by the piano and cello. In the development a spiky rhythmic motif penetrates through the flowing textures of the first theme, but soon the gentler second theme reappears. All seems in order, until an unusual pianissimo "recapitulation" section where all moves in slow motion, with staccato chords in the piano and sustained notes in the cello. The second movement has a perpetual motion energy, its thrusting repeated ostinato pattern relentlessly shared while a delicate first theme is presented by the piano in widely spaced octaves. The cello’s more light-hearted theme is later imitated up in the piano’s brittle high register.  Piquant wit abounds in familiar classical gestures set askew, sudden lurches into unrelated keys, until the initial driving ostinato resumes, leading to a sudden conclusion. The bleak expanses of Russia are evoked in the soulful slow movement, the piano providing a dark backdrop for the cello’s rhapsodic, vocal theme. Reflective introspection through icy dissonances that touch, yet do not settle, on warmer consonances until the music at last fades into impressionistic twilight. Caustic wit colors the brief ebullient finale, a type of rondo in which the main playful theme appears three times, imitated by both instruments, interspersed by episodes full of sparkling scales. In the second of these, the piano is let loose in a cadenza of helter-skelter zest, ebulliently veering into unexpected tonal highways. The theme returns, to round the movement off in abrupt yet decisive brilliance.   Hans Kristian Goldstein

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.